


Miroirs

by borage (haechansheaven)



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Canon Compliant, Introspection, Kunimi Akira-centric, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-09-27
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:09:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26682718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haechansheaven/pseuds/borage
Summary: I wanted to be saved,Akira says to the waves. Saltwater pours down his throat, filling vacant spaces, and that is how everything ends.
Relationships: Kageyama Tobio & Kunimi Akira, Kageyama Tobio/Kunimi Akira
Comments: 5
Kudos: 60





	Miroirs

**Author's Note:**

> written while listening to the following concerti/pieces:  
> Maurice Ravel - Miroirs  
> Taki Rentarou - Moon over the ruined castle  
> Antonio Vivaldi - The Four Seasons: Winter  
> Alexander Borodin - In the Steppes of Central Asia  
> Moritz Moszkowski - Piano Concerto No. 2 in E major, Op.59

**I.** _Noctuelles_

For all the grace in his body, Akira is a clumsy child. There are scars, faint by now, on the heels of his hands to prove it. They were shallow then and are shallow now, and sometimes he stares at them in fascination under the light of the moon, even if he can’t really see them and it’s all in his head.

Everything is technically in his head, anyways. The human senses are mechanical and chemical reactions within cells that travel from one end of his arm to the center of his brain where they fester for a while, in theory, and tell him what’s happening, in theory. Akira, after all, doesn’t believe things unless he can see them.

When he’s four, his mother takes him to his first piano lesson and the keys feel so smooth against the pad of his fingers that will one day begin to wear the beginnings of calluses he will so diligently pick at, and he wonders if perhaps this can be his future. The piano is the first light, and Akira is drawn to its brilliance in a show of passion that hits once, and only once.

A baby grand piano from his grandfather sits in the corner of the living room and Akira plunks away at the keys at four, finds some tune at five, and chases after melodies and rhythms that tease him from behind waterfalls and around boulders until he is ten. This is excitement, this is dedication, and this is what Akira finds himself most comfortable with, even as Yūtarō knocks on his door with a volleyball tucked under his arm, asking if he wants to play.

“He has a talent for it,” his teacher says to his mother, as if he cannot hear, cannot understand, “technically speaking, but he lacks the emotion for it. The fervor, the, the—”

“I understand.” Softness and grace coat his mother’s discomfort as she nods. “I see.”

Akira counts from ten to zero, and then twenty to zero, and then thirty to zero, because he’s _ten_ now, not four, and he knows what they mean. Passion, after all, cannot drive success when there is no talent keeping it straight so it can grow the way the world wants it to. The inverse also rings true. Success is nothing with passion.

There’s a hand on his shoulder, a sympathetic glance from his mother, and the light dies out, just like that. Without a flame to follow, Akira stumbles.

The shoes feel too tight, so he ties them tighter, tips of his fingers turning colorless with the force of his grip until he lets go and feels the phantom force slowly lift itself from his bones and disappear into the air. Yūtarō stands in front of him with _excitement_ and Akira gets it, in a way.

If he leans back far enough, he can peer into the family room and watch the rising sun reflect off the piano, still dusted every single day even though it’s lonely without the virtuoso that Akira dreamt he could’ve been.

“If you tie them any tighter, you’ll cut off circulation.”

Twisting his ankles this way, that way, Akira nods. “Yeah. I might.”

This is a replacement dream. How far it will stretch and what it will bring him are consequences—byproducts—that Akira will think about when they appear before him, bowing on one knee and asking him to choose which ones to keep. There’s nothing in particular that he seeks on this journey.

Perhaps it’s better than nothing.

“Did you know,” Akira mutters into darkness, blanket pulled over his mouth, “that moths fly towards the light, not because they’re foolish, but because the world has made them fools?”

Yūtarō halts, unsure of what to say. Unsure if there _is_ anything to say. In the light of the moon, Akira looks particularly small, bordering on transparent. If he didn’t know better, he’d think that his best friend was disappearing in front of his very eyes. But Akira isn’t that weak; he wouldn’t allow himself to be swept away by the world.

“No.” Yūtarō turns on his side as he responds to look away from his friend who sees a world he can’t. “No, I didn’t.”

“It’s called transverse orientation. We humans follow the North Star, and they follow the moon. In a cruel twist of fate, we’ve evolved past the need for something we call primitive, and they fall, not because they are fools, but because the world has left them behind.”

There are a thousand thoughts that run through Akira’s mind at any given time. They’re vast, and they’re endless, and if no one knew any better, they’d think he was a stranger from another planet, here to learn how Earth works, wearing the skin of a human. Akira is an alien in his own right, though, stumbling through life like a newborn. Each chapter of his growth feels too new, too jarring, and he’s tired of it. If anything, he’d like to just sleep for forever and a day.

On a court, Akira meets Kageyama Tobio, who looks around with eyes so wide he doesn’t seem to be seeing _anything_ , and Akira wonders how it feels to open and chapter and never close it. He’s twelve and the world hasn’t worked the way he wanted to in forever, not that he’s tried very hard to make it bend to his whim.

Tobio blinks and expects the world to follow his lead and, somewhere along the way, Akira is pulled along in whatever direction this young noble wishes for him to go. Such is fate, and such is this chapter of Akira’s life, started with a deceptively poetic note in the way that he is a moth with no flames to lead him astray.

There’s a hand on his shoulder and he knows it’s Yūtarō because that’s how long they’ve been together; Akira has memorized the quietly forming calluses at the base of each of Yūtarō’s five fingers and, right, he’s a good friend, he’s a good companion, so he’s surely good enough at something that this path won’t be as fruitless as the last.

“That’s Kageyama Tobio,” Yūtarō whispers, as if Akira hadn’t already heard the coach call his name. “They say he’s a _really_ good setter.”

Not that it matters to Akira. He’s not here to be _the best_ or to be _the star_. This, for now, is a way to fill up the time that’s filled with shards of glass and dreams of playing Taki Rentarō’s “Moon over the ruined castle” with a vocal accompanist that would make his mother weep tears of joy. It’s not technically difficult, but it’s symbolic in some backwards sort of way that Akira doesn’t know yet, even if fate does.

His teacher had told him that it wasn’t a song meant to rocket him to fame, and Akira had smiled and said it wasn’t that complex, nor that simple, and it was only one goal of many. These days, he wonders if it would’ve been better to choose “Regret” instead.

Practice ends, Tobio looks for someone to practice spiking with, and Akira leaves the gymnasium with Yūtarō by his side. The spring night is cool, like a warning that is noticed yet ignored in favor of ignorance. It is, after all, bliss.

  
  
  
  
  


**II.** _Oiseaux tristes_

Akira is twelve and no longer alone. Not that he was actually ever alone to start with. It’s simply that there are _people_ around him now that don’t look through him like he doesn’t exist and it’s different and it’s scary and something deep within him wonders if this is the sort of thing he’s always been chasing after with reckless abandon.

There are white flames propelling Tobio and Yūtarō forward, while Akira wraps his arms around his barely glowing embers and blows just enough so they never go out. He doesn’t have enough energy to chase after them the way others do. They’re burning at 1600°C, traveling at a speed he can’t even fathom, bodies nothing but blurs in his periphery. Whatever energy they have is endless, boundless, while Akira scrambles to collect coals to keep himself alive and warm.

Winters are cold, though they’re colder without inertia, and Akira is wishing he knew what any of that meant.

Tobio turns thirteen, Yūtarō crowing about some club that Akira isn’t a part of yet, and they live whatever life a middle schooler is supposed to live, except everything is on a slant with no supports and things are constantly shifting to the left too far, too far, too far; all much too quickly. Extending a hand with a brilliant smile, Oikawa Tōru pulls them onto a surface that is flat where they cannot wobble like newborns, and Akira is _truly_ seen for who he is for the first time in forever.

Antonio Vivaldi composed _The Four Seasons_ ( _Le quattro stagioni_ ), a collection of four violin concerti, to express each season in the way he viewed it. “Winter ( _L'inverno_ )” begins as _Allegro non molto_ in F minor, brisk and frantic like stepping out into the cold, and Akira likens it to being pulled into the world by Tōru, whose moves at a cadence and to a rhythm that everyone can only watch and attempt to recreate with horrid results.

Time beside Tōru passes like movement two, _Largo_ in E♭ major, with understanding yet the impending end. All things end eventually, though, a lesson that Akira understands all too well. And time, so close to the end, passes uncharacteristically quickly like _Allegro_ in F minor. And that’s the pleasant thing about the movements of each concerti. A return to the beginning. Winter is again frantic, though rather than brisk, it feels impending, and, well, there’s truth to that.

Akira recites these facts in his head like a machine as Hajime slaps Tōru on the back and tells him to get a grip, that they’ll win next year, that this is only one end, and there are plenty more to go. Life is like music in that songs have a beginning, a middle, and end. Akira doesn’t feel sad and says goodbye to their time together frankly.

After all, Oikawa Tōru _sees_ him, but Akira has always felt more comfortable with people looking through him.

The bones of birds are hollow and their lungs are efficient, and they’re a work of art in such a way that Akira would press his fingers against windows and leave his identity behind just to watch them fly through the sky. There are those that flap furtively to stay afloat and those that propel themselves between clouds and ride the winds that the earth blows in every cardinal direction.

Gliding is efficient, and Akira thinks of himself as soaring through life, high above the ground, the wind carrying him around the world a million times over. His wings are wide, feathers long, eyes only ever looking ahead. He breathes in clouds, feels the sun on his back, and searches for a destination he doesn’t even know he’s looking for.

On the Galapagos islands exist Galapagos finches. Scientists study whether the trait of being wary of invasive predators is a learned or inherited trait. Charles Darwin had said that the birds were so friendly he could scoop them up in a hat. Tobio is a Galapagos finch and Akira is a migratory bird that passes by, watching with both curiosity and sadness as Tobio approaches a stranger that wishes to pluck his feathers, preserve his eyes, and catalogue him for posterity.

He doesn’t see the arrow pointed his way.

“Oh, that bird’s song is nice,” Tobio says, stopping on the sidewalk. There’s a tree hanging over a fence where a bird sits and trills so loudly that Akira considers throwing a rock to make it go away. He doesn’t, though. Instead, he and Yūtarō stand still and let Tobio stare up between branches towards an avian they can’t even see. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that bird before, though.”

Yūtarō scoffs, because that’s what he does, that’s who he is; loud and unapologetic enough for both him and Akira, who listens by Tobio’s side because, well, he’s right, he’s never heard this bird before. “C’mon. We’re gonna catch a cold if we stand around all sweaty.”

Tobio follows, because that’s what Tobio does, eager and excitable and all the things that Akira could never be for Yūtarō. Not that it matters, after all. Not that their friendship is so weak that a wide-eyed starling could swoop in and chatter for a friend in a place that it can’t even call home. It’s a song that doesn’t belong in their tree; foreign and discomforting and everything that Akira has spent his entire life pushing away to the edge of branches in order to watch them fall to the ground and shatter into a million pieces.

He sings along, anyways, though, because Tobio’s charm is gravitational. Limits have been put in place to how far Akira can stray from the boy with eyes that are so wide they can’t see anything; the small, shaking boy who clutches a volleyball in his hands and smiles when everyone says _no_. The boy who can see a future beyond any of them, without any of them, never for any of them, because that’s what the world has willed him to do, even as Akira sits in his own sickness and festers in a weird sort of loneliness that doesn’t strangle the life out of him, but doesn’t satisfy him, either. 

Birds call to warn, beg, search, and depart, and the ability to discern between them is lost to an untrained ear. A murder of crows, a bevy of qual, a charm of finches, a wisp of snipe. Human nature seeks to categorize and give names to things that it can see and understand. Akira does not deviate; he observes, he takes note, and he categorizes the people in his life according to their role, each category a group with a distinct name.

Tobio’s call, foreign, lacks a category; there’s symbolism because Tobio stands on his own even if he calls and listens to replies as if they understand him, and there’s symbolism because Akira calls to no one, just the same.

“Kunimi,” Tobio says, and it’s gentle and fragile and curious, “are you coming?”

“I wonder.” Akira walks, brushing shoulders with Tobio. “I wonder if someone lost a pet bird. It’ll die out here.”

“That’s sad.” His voice is a whisper.

_That’s life_.

Thirteen comes with the return of spring, promise of flowers blooming, and a new year that approaches like a freight train without brakes. Akira receives gifts, well-wishes, and an impending sense of doom. Tobio’s eyes, already unfocused, waver and see a place that no one around him can reach. Even Yūtarō crashes and burns into the earth, desperate to recover the passion he has raised so kindly.

Unfocused eyes turn into an unsteady heart, easily overcome by a pure sort of greed, and things become fragmented at a steady sort of pace. Compassion, Akira thinks, is quite hard to come by these days.

He gets it, though. If he had a dream—if he had something he loved as much as Tobio yearns to stand on court—and if he was a different person, Akira thinks that he would chase it just the same. There’s a sort of tunnel vision that comes with passion. A willingness to sacrifice everything else that exists in the periphery.

Or, Akira understands it _conceptually_ , at least. The execution is a whole other thing that Akira can’t bother himself to figure out the inner workings of. Whatever he understands doesn’t matter when a friend is falling to pieces in front of him. It’s so much effort to reach out with a hand that Tobio won’t even take.

A bird calls in the distance, but it’s not a sound that he recognizes, just different enough that no one responds. The world warps, Akira loses sight, and that’s that. 

  
  
  
  
  


**III.** _Une barque sur l'océan_

Oh, how quickly the sky can change from blue to black, and oh, how quickly the tides can turn a boat unprepared for its demise. Despite it all, Akira watches the storm approach from the south, feels the waves rock the boat, and still allows the ocean to swallow him whole. The whole is once again on a slant, but there is no person to extend their hand and pull him back to the surface.

No one left to listen to him and his lies. _I wanted to be saved_ , Akira says to the waves. Saltwater pours down his throat, filling vacant spaces, and that is how everything ends. Tobio walks off court, a different person, and whatever peace existed is fragmented into a million tiny shards. Akira can see the pieces of Tobio scattered across the court, up and down sidewalks, in the hallways of their middle school.

He can trail after them if he really wants to; follow them and find a broken Tobio at the end, maybe even under a rainbow, tucked between trees and hidden in plain sight. Akira doesn’t though. He won’t, because that’s not his place, it’s never been his place, and he doesn’t know what he’d do if he found Tobio, lifeless, listless, lost. 

They begin apart, but whole, and end apart, but broken. There was probably something written in the stars about them coming together like a meteorite ready to destroy earth, not that any of them would’ve listened. The world is their playground, after all, and this is the world they can make their own if they so choose. It’s simply unfortunate that they shatter like a country rebelling against its king.

“We need to say something,” Yūtarō had said, firm and unrelenting.

“Then we should say something.” Akira had picked at non-existent dirt under his nails as he spoke. Everything falling apart had seemed so far away at the time. “Nothing’s getting done like this.”

Deep beneath a roaring ocean is a calm that you cannot see unless you breathe in water and call its depths your home. Akira reaches for that peace, regardless, holding his breath, closing his eyes, and counting as seconds pass even if Tobio skips school for the second day in a row and classmates whisper, asking what happened to the boy who saw his future.

He wants to tell them he’s not sure and that they’re not as quiet as they like to think they are. It’s a reminder that reality is cruel in the word sorts of ways, and that even if Tobio had run them over on the court, it had never pulled itself into classrooms and books. Time passes, though, and Akira couldn’t tell Tobio even if he wanted to. Watching his former curl into himself, embrace anger, and step on glass is hard, no matter how apathetic to others struggles he wishes to be.

A life of efficiency is what he craves, and yet Akira finds himself pulled farther and farther from that possibility as time drags on, Tobio becomes unrelenting in his search for those who will stand beside him, and Yūtarō seals himself off.

All their heads are caught under the waves, and it isn’t as peaceful as Akira had hoped.

Akira searches for peace in places that he had abandoned long ago, because even if they are no longer within immediate sight, they are familiar; even if they have changed, Akira thinks he can see back to the core and find what he loved all over again. He imagines the hard lines of Yūtarō’s frown disappearing, imagines Tobio’s back straight and tall, and pretends that he never said anything; that these years never happened.

Maurice Ravel was a man with a bright mind, comfortable to exist at the edge of society, writing songs for the Bösendorfer Imperial Grand Piano. The third movement of _Miroirs_ , “ _Une barque sur l’ocean_ ”, was written for such a thing, the inclusion of G♯ creating an octave where common pianos could not. Akira learns of this when he’s fifteen and his mind is scattered, and old wishes rear their ugly, unwelcome heads.

Akira’s fingers do not move the way they used to, and he plunks away at keys, back hunched, as his mother cooks dinner in the kitchen and his father walks down the stairs to help.

There are extra keys on the Bösendorfer, reaching an octave so low, vibrations so jarring, that everything sounds borderline dissonant on their own. He relents, though, that his ear is untrained as he had abandoned music for something else and, well, this is what he gets.

“Akira.” His mother calls his name from the kitchen, though it seems to take eons to reach him. “Would you set the table?”

Closing the piano isn’t closing a chapter this time, though Akira hates it just as much as he did the first time. In a warm kitchen with his parents, he can pretend that nothing has changed, and everything is the same, now that they don’t ask about Tobio anymore.

A new spring brings Aoba Johsai and Oikawa Tōru, who once again extends a hand that Akira takes, though this time without grace. He’s empty, with nothing but sea water in his bones. There are others that wait for him and understand him, and Akira wants to be grateful.

He just thinks he’s tired of being seen.

New classmates. New faces. New names. A new schedule. Akira adapts and overcomes and, to the world, becomes complacent. He knows this from the way people look at him and ask if he’s bored, if he’d rather be doing something else, if this isn’t enough. But it _is_ enough, Akira has simply begun to see that there’s something missing.

Boats are buoyant, even if they weigh enough to crush a man. Even if they move with enough force to shatter a wooden dock into shards. Yūtarō waves a hand in front of Akira’s face and asks, with a jovial laugh, what he’s thinking about.

“You’re impossible to read sometimes,” he admits, like it’s tragic. “But you haven’t even touched your lunch.”

“If a boat fell from high enough the sky, it would kill you because of velocity,” begins Akira, pushing his lunch away, “but it also probably weighs enough to kill you by simply toppling over. Despite this, a boat can float so long as its weight is less than that of the water it displaces. Buoyancy.”

Food is halfway to Yūtarō’s mouth, though he’s stunned enough that he misses entirely, crumbs decorating his cheek. “What? Have you been staying up late to read random articles on the internet again? The last time you did that, you started talking about moths.”

“That fact was cool, though, wasn’t it?”

They were a boat—he, Yūtarō, and Tobio—whose weight had become too much for the sea to bear. Akira learns to accept this fact, guides Yūtarō towards accepting this fact, and stretches his neck towards the sky as weight is lifted, bit by bit. There’s no salvaging their sunken boat, and it’s too much to begin rebuilding a new one so soon. They’ve taken too much water and they’ve fallen much too deep.

“Sure,” Yūtarō says, shaking his head. “It was.”

The people around him don’t have to understand what Akira means. That’s not why he speaks. It’d be too much effort to attempt that. But, Kageyama Tobio is no longer made up of nothing but pieces of broken glass, and that is enough for now.

Akira meets Hinata Shōyō _properly_ in his first year of high school, and begins to see the sun as time passes, as if day has just broken. It’s not nearly as prophetic or astounding as the hand that Tōru holds out for him, but it’s better than nothing. He looks at green trees, green grass, the light reflecting off flowing brooks, and thinks that it’s better, though the night was always fine to him.

His mind cannot wrap itself around this new world with sincerity, though. Not yet.

Not when Tobio has picked up his pieces, Yūtarō has begun to fix his, and Akira is just learning that he’s very, very broken. The world asks him what a memory is when he has no proof of it, and Akira simply shrugs his shoulders and wonders why he ever needed memories to begin with.

“There’s this school,” Shōyō says around a mouthful of burger and _why_ is he here again, “called Inarizaki. And, get this, their team motto is _who needs memories_. Can you believe that? I don’t wanna forget playing on this team!”

Yūtarō nods sagely, like he _understands_ , and dignifies the orange-haired stranger with an answer. “Sure. They’re the school with that Miya Atsumu, right? The best high school setter. Or he was, until Kageyama appeared.”

Akira blinks. Where _is_ Tobio? This whole situation feels backwards without him here, considering that this is _his_ teammate, not theirs. In fact, the whole process of leading him here was a blur in the most disconcerting of ways. Akira counts backwards from ten, twenty, thirty, content with the way that the world passes him by without looking his way.

“Right, right! They say he’s gonna go pro after high school.” Akira thinks Shōyō will choke and die if he continues to talk with food in his mouth. “He’s _super_ good! Having him and Kageyama on the same team would be a shame, though, I think. Then one of them would never get to play!”

_Well_ , Akira wants to say, _that’s just the way that the world works_. But he doesn’t, because this isn’t his conversation to intrude on. He has no stake in anything, anyways. These years will pass and Akira will attend university, find a job, and leave these memories behind. That has been written in the stars since the day he first decided to give up on a dream trampled under the feet of those who thought they _knew_ him but clearly didn’t.

“Speaking of, weren’t you supposed to meet him an hour ago?”

Shōyō looks at his phone with a passive expression that melts into panic, burger shoved into his mouth before shoving everything into the trash. And Akira gets it. “Well, gotta go! Sorry!”

And, just like that, Akira is plunged back into darkness.

  
  
  
  
  


**IV.** _Alborada del gracioso_

Memories are somewhat dissonant with the truth, regardless of the teller, and Akira is no exception to that. The world will continue to spin, and Akira will stare into the distance and think, yes, okay, that’s it, this is it. His memories will continue to be his own for however long he wishes, and if he wants to twist the truth into something that feels more complete, he will.

He never stands on court at nationals, not that he ever wanted to, and he never sees someone else’s dream come true, not that he was ever hoping for that to happen. Akira’s dreams are passive these days, anyways; carefully calculated to be attainable in a realistic fashion. No crash landing in foreign countries and alienating himself. No struggling to keep his head above water. Now that his feet are steady and rooted, there is no reason for Akira to struggle anymore.

Akira is eighteen and the light of a rising sun reflects off the window of the shop just enough to blind him and bring him to a stop, disappearing behind a cloud. This is his come to God moment, probably; staring at Kageyama Tobio’s face on the cover of a magazine with a stilted smile, volleyball tucked under his arm. Standing in the middle of an empty sidewalk as the world around him begins to wake up.

Tobio has chased a dream and inches closer to every single goal he makes. Akira scuffs the dirt off his shoes on pavement and wonders what exactly he’s amounted to. They’re not the same, but they are, because they walk towards things that don’t seem to have an end. Akira is simply lost.

An aubade is a morning song for lovers, the opposite of a serenade. It can serve as a warning of daybreak, harkening the man to leave his lover for another day or a way to welcome the life that comes with the rising of a star in the sky. Akira isn’t sure, even as his body moves forward on its own, tearing his eyes away from Tobio’s face and forcing him back on whatever path he had started on.

Life sings its own song for Akira as the sun rises on yet another day, and his body is bid to obey its command. This is how things are, shall be, will be.

Society has asked the mind to separate the arts and sciences. Alexander Borodin was an organic chemist who happened to pursue music with fervor, as well. Passion, dedication, and discipline, there is something poetic about a man who worked for _success_ and found it in two different ways. Akira finds him accidentally on purpose, reclined in his bed, phone in hand, intrigued by the past off-handed comments by his teacher.

“In the Steppes of Central Asia” evokes an image, as it should, its existence as a symphonic poem painting the steppe lands of the Caucasus, caravans, and Russian troops. Akira closes his eyes and pretends he can see it in his mind. It was dedicated to Franz Liszt—because why wouldn’t it be? Akira thinks, staring at his wall—a name that his mind associates with Niccolò Paganini in the sort of way that probably has others rolling in their graves.

But Akira is new to this all over again, and he’s not even sure how long he plans to stay.

Music is a majestic sort of thing that becomes consuming, wrapping itself around Akira’s wrists and pulling him back to where he started. It isn’t in a terrible sort of way, so he lets it happen and falls into bottomless voids where it takes a while to pull himself back out.

Life will always move at a frantic pace, even if Akira can’t keep up. This is the truth as he chooses his courses for university, meets Yūtarō for lunch at their favorite place, and watches the announcement of Tobio’s addition to the Schweiden Adlers. (This fact comes second to his position on the national team for whatever reason, and Akira doesn’t try to dwell on it too much.)

Pause.

Head in his hands, Akira recognizes that there are hundreds of paths he can take. For all the things he’s experienced, all the decisions he’s made, nothing seems to have any linearity or justification. Life has seemed to amount to nothing but a collection of random events. And, for now, Akira thinks that it’s fine.

Perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, they’ll all come together and make some sort of sense. There’s time to figure that out.

One morning, Akira wakes up to an empty house and a magazine on the kitchen table. Several, really, all lined up nice and pretty, a note placed on top of the middle one. It’s meticulous, and the handwriting isn’t far from it. He knows what it says before he even reads it, Tobio’s face staring at him seven different times.

He stacks them up, one on top of another, and places them back in his room, before leaving the house. It’s not like he’s forgotten what Tobio looks like, or what he’s up to, even if it is a bit of a taboo in the alumni chat. Hajime is the only one to bring it up, and even he’s careful as to when, making sure it’s drowned in hundreds of messages while Tōru is still asleep in Argentina where he’s blooming, thriving, finding himself again.

“How’re classes?” Hajime asks over the phone because that’s the kind of guy he is. “Having trouble with anything?”

“I’m fine. Honestly.” Out of the corner of his eye, he watches Yūtarō frantically erase an answer before trying again. “Kindaichi’s fine, too. We’re all fine.”

“Right.”

“Kageyama is fine, too.”

Hajime’s laugh is still the same, even if they all change a little more every day, and Akira likes that. He likes the constants any one person may have. “Yeah. I can see that much. His face is everywhere, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” There is a stack of magazines in Akira’s room that is proof of this fact. He wonders how long he’s been looking Tobio’s way without realizing it. “Are you surprised?”

“Not at all.”

No one is, really. Tobio has always been destined for greatness in the sort of way that forces you to look in his direction, no matter which way he walks. Akira is no exception to that fact. Even now, years after their paths have diverged, he can’t help his gaze.

_Akira,_

_I saw these for sale while I was shopping the other day and thought you might want them. You always were proud of Kageyama and his successes, weren’t you?_

_If you don’t want them, let me know and I’ll find someone to give them to or recycle them._

_Mom_

Akira’s mind does this convenient thing of forgetting things that he doesn’t deem important and remembering them at the most inconvenient times. He’s twenty, standing in front of a selection of chips in the market, when his mind places an image of Kageyama Tobio in front of his face. And this shit is getting ridiculous now, but he gets it. The world adores Kageyama Tobio’s awkward smile, earnest answers, and inability to navigate the social norms of events. Akira does, too.

Probably.

He’s not really all that sure, but the more days that pass, the more things he remembers about Tobio at twelve, eyes open so, so wide and eager to make friends that see the world the same way he does. It’s unfortunate that the world warped him into someone even he couldn’t recognize, and it took a rising sun to save him. Tragedies are pretty to watch, even if they’re painful to think about. Akira adores Tobio in the sort of way one thinks fondly about their childhood.

There are bits and pieces of Tobio that are missing for him; moments that he wasn’t able to see, and still can’t visualize, no matter how many times his face appears on the television. Akira’s doesn’t mind that, though. It’s been long since he last thought he could learn every single thing about a person.

He’ll be twenty-one when he sees Tobio smile his way for the first time in forever, all natural and not disjointed, making a promise that he isn’t sure when they’ll keep, even if it’s an inevitability. The same wide-eyed boy will never look at him from across the court again, but Akira can’t bring himself to care about those things anymore. There’s no point in dwelling over something that he can’t change.

  
  
  
  
  


**V.** _La vallée des cloches_

Tobio comes and goes as he pleases, and Akira understands. If he could do everything over again, he doesn’t think he would. None of them would, probably. A specific sequence of events has led them to this: Tobio coming and going, as he does; Yūtarō visiting home from Saitama; and Akira, watching the world turn from Miyagi, as he always has.

It was never written in the stars for them to stay side by side, and Akira is sure, if they tried things one more time, they’d end up apart, once again. A bell can toll and call the start of a new year, and the three of them will always slowly drift apart, even when together. Fate has declared it to be so, and Akira has never fought against destiny.

So he sits in front of the piano and learns to play all over again. It’s a hobby, the kind of thing that he tries not to take too seriously, even as he’s listening to Moszkowski’s Piano Concerto, Op. 59 on the way to work on a crowded train.

_I won’t look back and wonder what if_ , Akira thinks to himself. _Lies_ to himself as he ponders whether piano lessons would be worth it or not. Surely there’s something to be said for unfulfilled, abandoned dreams that are lifted by the swell of a crescendo and dropped off at his feet. There are so many things that Akira realizes he wants to do, paired with the realization that he isn’t sure he’ll ever get around to them all.

Akira doesn’t aspire to leave an everlasting mark on the world. All he wishes for is a life that he can live comfortably and confidently. Even requests so simple as that are difficult to accomplish, though, and he finds himself walking in circles in an attempt to find the path he’s walked so far from.

Perhaps it’s because he’s where it all started and where it looks like it’s going to end. He’s not sure. There’s something to be said for living in slow-changing familiarity for a majority of one's life, and Akira is quick to learn this lesson. It’s so easy for everything to pass him by.

He’s getting tired of it, though. Time is a fickle lover, and Akira can do nothing but pray to a deity in the hopes that it will pass slower and stop leaving him behind.

Akira isn’t sure why he expected Tobio to be there. Given the circumstances, the history, the future, he shouldn’t have. But he sits at the end of the table, hands pressed together between his knees, and watches the door, anyways. Yūtarō leans forward as Tōru tells stories of Argentina with grand gestures, and Hajime rolls his eyes in the fond sort of way you do when a child knocks something over and looks up at you with wide eyes.

More than anything, the question of why Akira _wants_ Tobio to be there looms over his shoulder like an impending storm, seeping into his bones and pulling him back into the dirt. There’s been time for him to consider the way that the seedling of Tobio’s existence in his life was planted in dry soil and survived through the years.

When the rain finally fell, it bloomed, quite beautifully. The conclusion doesn’t come as an epiphany, though it still feels jarring. All the moments of Tobio adding up, second by second, until he’s there, a permanent figure in his mind. Bits and pieces of Tobio are things that he wishes he could see in himself, and that’s how things started.

The magazines still sit on his desk—it’s a new one now, though—and he still stops in front of the window of stores with Tobio’s face staring back at him. It’s never been out of pride or amazement. Somehow, somewhere along the way, Akira realized that whatever path Tobio took, it would be one of greatness.

In the same vein, Akira is destined for the same thing, over and over and over again. And that is that.

The ringing of bells can have many meanings. Celebration, mourning, warning. These days, there is a chiming sound that seems to follow him everywhere, as if someone has tied a bell around Akira’s neck.

Down a sidewalk, he sees Tobio’s face again, except it’s not behind glass, and it’s staring at him with the same kind of shock and, well, is this sort of thing fate, too?

Akira is in a suit, Tobio is in a sweatsuit, and don’t they make quite the pair? Tobio’s feet are wrapped in his slippers, Akira can swear he hears the watch around his wrist ticking, and people can’t help but stare at them.

“... Are those your slippers?”

“No.”

Lips pressed together, he takes in one deep breath, and then another. “I’m absolutely sure those are your slippers.”

“No.”

When he was younger, Akira thought that he could see Tobio when he looked in the mirror. As he grew, the mirror turned into an image of what he wished for rather than what he was. The Tobio before him is living the life he dreamed for, and Akira still wonders what his dream was in the first place.

He is not Tobio, though, and Tobio is not him. For all the times that he’s searched for similarities, Akira finds comfort in their differences, as well, in a twisted sort of way. He’s not sure if he’s ever crossed Tobio’s mind over the years, other than maybe in passing through a friend. Meanwhile his mind has amassed a repository of Tobio’s smile, seen through windows and on television screens.

“Those are your indoor slippers. You had the same brand when we were in middle school. Or they look the same, anyways.” For good measure, he points at Tobio’s feet. It’s just to drive the point home.

A bell rings.

“You remember that?”

_Apparently_ , Akira thinks, _I remember a lot of things about you_. Not that he’d ever _tell_ Tobio that. The list of facts he has stored in his mind are fated to stay there until he’s dead. “Sure,” he says. Feigns apathy. He even lets his gaze trail to the window to his right. “You were particular about them. I think.”

There are a million things that Tobio was particular about, though Akira isn’t sure if he still is. It’s been years since he’s known Tobio like that and it’s weird to think about Tobio as a stranger, even though he’s _always_ been one. He’s fooled himself into thinking that he knew him at all.

“Yeah.” Tobio stares at his feet like they’re thousands of miles away and the concrete is swallowing him whole. The people around them are spectators to a meeting that feels fated. “Do you want to get dinner tonight?”

His tongue stumbles around the question like it isn’t him speaking the words. Akira laughs, a soft sound, in response; watches the edges of Tobio’s expression crumble a little. It’s not a joke. They’re both lonely, he supposes. There are thousands of things that Akira could do instead of becoming friends with a stranger.

“Sure.”

He supposes that it isn’t the worst thing that he could do. Akira is supposing a lot these days. Tobio’s smile is probably worth all the speculation.

Tobio comes and goes with the seasons and with the years, though his slippers stay the same. It’s a fact that Akira can fixate on. They eat dinners together, and Tobio tells him about Rome in a way that Akira can’t picture. He tells Tobio this one night, staring at him over homemade dishes.

“You’re talking about Rome like I’ve been there. I haven’t.”

“Then you should.” Tobio pauses, and he sounds like he’s swallowing his tongue. “You should come to Rome one day, then. So you can see everything and I don’t have to describe it to you anymore.”

The solution is so _simple_ and straightforward in a Tobio sort of way that Akira wants to laugh and record the moment; send it to Yūtarō and ask, _Doesn’t this remind you of that one time when we were kids and Kageyama was trying to describe that park his grandfather took him to?_

And, that’s right, there are plenty of memories with Tobio there, in the forefront. His eyes aren’t as wide with wonder, and he’s learned to tread carefully, but this is the same man who was a boy that listened to birds in trees while walking home from school.  
“You make it sound so easy.” Akira’s fingers press into his thighs as a reminder that this is real. “Is it really that easy?”

“Well,” Tobio says, simply, “I’ll be there, so you won’t get lost.”

It sounds like a promise. A crescendo, bells ringing in the distance. 

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading :]  
> also, if there are any glaring typos, i apologize. i edited the first little vignette, and then called it a day...


End file.
